Today, the combination of wireless communication, phone and Internet offers consumers access to many different services. In particular, modern communication technology and networks enable a user to access services which are associated with the identity of the user, such as banking services, telephone services, home video provision services, auction services, broking services or medical services. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to verify that an individual, often referred to as “claimant”, who requests access to certain services, is in fact a certain subscriber authorized to access said certain services.
Typically, a customer requesting access to a certain service is requested to provide a subscriber name and a personal identification number (PIN) prior to obtaining access to said service. Then, it is decided whether or not the customer requesting access to said certain service is really a subscriber of said service by comparing the PIN provided by the customer with a PIN associated with the subscriber name and stored in a database of a server providing the requested service.
Although such PIN based methods are widely used, they are susceptible to deception, as any imposter gaining knowledge about a subscriber's name and PIN is able to deceive a service access security mechanism by requesting access to the service in the name of said subscriber and providing said subscriber's PIN, thereby obtaining access to the service in said subscriber's name.
Therefore, there exists an increasing interest in improved security technologies such as biometric based technologies, in which a person's identity is verified by one or more of his/her personal biological characteristics including fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, facial patterns and voice. For services based on digital communication, voice-based security technologies are particularly attractive, as the infrastructure and hardware to implement voice-based security technologies already exist in today's digital communication networks. Therefore, voice-based security mechanisms such as speaker authentication technologies can be implemented cost effectively, leading to a growing demand for such speaker authentication technology solutions.